Late Night Wake Up Call
by robertskycard
Summary: Terra hasn't been adjusting well since she last saw Beast Boy. To her, some secrets are best left buried, including her entire identity. But now that she's spoken to him again, all those memories she's kept buried have come back to haunt her, and it's her burden to fight the ghosts of the past.
1. Chapter 1

**Hey! robertskycard here!**

 ** _Teen Titans_ was the show that got me to start enjoying super hero stories. The reason was because it was a discovery of characters I'd never heard of before (except for Robin, basically the only one tying any of it together with stuff I'd heard before as a kid). The most impactful story arc (to me) was the Terra arc in season 2. Love her or hate her, Terra is without a doubt one of the most divisive characters of _Teen Titans_. She was (and still is) one of my absolute favorite characters. I couldn't really voice why then, but I think I related to her so well because of how she appeared to be a confident individual but in truth was ruled by her fears. This dichotomy and her inability to let herself be vulnerable became destructive, and even though she was working with the bad guy, I was rooting for her to come back and join the team for real. Then, she killed Slade and sacrificed herself to stop that volcano. Her downfall was brought about by fear, manipulation, her own poor judgement, and, ultimately, her desire to set things right with the friends she cares about.**

 **I'm not sure why, but I stopped watching _Teen Titans_ after a bit, I think around the time season 3 was doing reruns in anticipation for season 4. A few years down the line, I'm watching a trailer for this game. You may have heard of it. It's called _The Last of Us._ Anyway, I'm watching Ellie interact with Joel and I have no idea why but Ellie's voice sounds extremely familiar. I talk with my brother about it and he says, "Yeah, that's weird, I've heard that voice, too." So we end up doing some digging and, lo and behold, Ellie's voice actor, Ashley Johnson, had also been Terra's voice actor in _Teen Titans_. A little while after that, my brother and I get to reminiscing about how awesome that show was and then we decide to see if we can dig it up. Lo and behold, all five seasons were on Xbox video service and we ended up buying and bingewatching them all.**

 **It came as a MASSIVE surprise to me when Terra showed up at the end, and it was even more heartbreaking to see her send Beast Boy off like she did.**

 **Which brings us to this fic. Ultimately, I was inspired to write this as part of a larger, somewhat OC centric semi-fix-fic, which goes against pretty much every rule I set for myself when writing fanfiction. This scene was Terra's reintroduction before the real plot kicked off, where the OC convinces Terra to try to be a hero again (albeit begrugingly). It was an overly long, complicated story where Terra would eventually forgive herself for what she had done to the Titans and she would ultimately rejoin the core five as the sixth member.**

 **I think the creators of _Teen Titans_ have rather solid reasoning for Terra not wanting to rejoin the team. I also believe that Terra remembered everything that happened and pretended not to recognize Beast Boy, which I'm pretty sure is Word of God. With that said, I also really enjoyed the chemistry between her and Beast Boy (in fact, I'm pretty sure Beast Boy/Terra was my first OTP) and it really bugged me that their relationship never really got the happy ending I felt it deserved, while Starfire and Robin got a whole movie dedicated to theirs. That (and a superhero tabletop RPG called _Mutants and Masterminds_ ) inspired the original from whence this one-shot came. However, as a writer, I'm not in the habit of giving characters under my control a happy ending. I'm cruel, almost to a needless degree. I'm not good at fluff. I tend to write a lot about guilt, fear, and anger. A lot of what I write takes place in the minds of the characters on the page. **

**So here it is! The first fanfic I posted for _Teen Titans_! Enjoy!**

* * *

"Tara! You gonna close up shop?"

"Yeah. You can take off, Doug."

"Thanks. See you tomorrow!"

"You too!" Tara said cheerily. Tara never had any reason not to be cheerful. She waved as Doug slid out the door, the bell ringing gently as it closed behind him and he waved through the window of the diner. She continued setting chairs upside down on the tables and mopping. Truthfully, she would have rather he stayed, rather he'd made some innocuous comment about her hair, her shoes, her eyes, rather he stayed and sheepishly asked her on a date, or even just a friendly hangout. Tara would have liked that kind of thing. She didn't like the oppressive silence, the quiet squeak of her sneakers on a wet floor. She didn't like that when she was alone, she couldn't hide under a cheerful veneer. When she was alone, she had to face who she truly was.

She had to face Terra.

She looked down at her mop bucket. In the red glow of the neon lights, the dirty mop water looked like blood.

 _I killed him. I killed Slade._

She continued mopping, hoping the routine would keep her mind busy. Instead, it gave her time to think.

 _"How could you lose something you never had?"_

 _"Slade was right. You never had any friends."_

No. Slade said that to Terra. Beast Boy said that. Not her. Not to Tara. _They're not your friends, they're Terra's friends. They're superheroes. You're not._

Tara wheeled the mop back to the closet, dumping the bucket and rinsing it thoroughly. She rung out and hung up the mop, making certain it was as dry as she could make it so it wouldn't mold. She and Doug had already wiped down the tables and the counter. She made sure each of the registers was locked, checked the freezers to see if they were locked, and then went into the back. She collected her backpack, her books inside, and began to shut off the lights.

It was then that she saw the man leaning against the window, his palm against the glass. His hair was dark and stringy, hanging around his face. His skin was pale, sweaty, and he took big, gulping breaths. He was hunched over, perhaps about to throw up. _Drunk_ , she thought, _probably homeless by the look of his tattered clothes_. Tara had seen her fair share of them. Terra had, too, and had watched them piss themselves in alleys where she slept. She went to the other windows, closing the blinds one by one. When she got to the last window, he was still there. She knocked on the window to get his attention, shooting him an annoyed glare.

"Hey!" she snapped, "Buzz off!"

Terra would never have said that. Terra would have understood. Terra would have offered him half of the half-eaten sandwich she yanked out of a dumpster. But Tara had a job. She had school. She had friends. Tara was an innocent little girl with no clue about the real world. So she snapped the blinds closed instead.

She went into the back, making a once over, checking that every single thing had been taken care of. Doors locked, lights off. Everything in its proper place. She slung her backpack on, fiddling with the keys as she made her way toward the door. She looked back out toward the window. She couldn't see him through the blinds, but she hoped he wasn't out there. She went toward the door and snapped off the outside lights. The dull red became black as she opened and locked the front doors. She shut them and tested them, making sure they held firm. They did. She turned to walk away and saw the man still standing there, hunched over, palm against the window.

She approached him. Tara was annoyed. Terra was concerned.

"Can I help you?" she said, cocking her eyebrow.

The man fell forward onto the sidewalk, not even bracing himself. Drunks, she thought.

Tara probably would leave the man to wake up in a puddle of his own vomit. Terra knew someone who drowned that way. She looked around. There was no one around, no one who would see. She decided she could be Terra. Just for a few minutes.

"Okay, buddy, let's get you on your feet," she said as she reached down to grab him. She knew of a few shelters where they'd take him in even as drunk as he was. Terra had marked them as soon as she came to the city.

She grabbed onto his side and began to roll him over. He didn't move and was a lot heavier than he looked.

"Geez, what did you eat?" she groaned as she pulled on him harder, yanking with all her might. Finally he rolled over.

Her blood turned to ice.

His skin was pale and cold, his eyes rolled up into their sockets. His white shirt was stained red below the chest and the handle of a kitchen knife protruded from his gut. Terra backed away, hands before her. It was then that she looked at her own hands. They were stained with his blood.

"How does it feel, Terra? To know you have my blood on your hands?"

She looked. The dead man wore Slade's mask.

Terra woke up screaming.

* * *

There was a knock on the door about fifteen minutes after she woke up, heralded by flashing blue and red lights. Mrs. Jenkins, the crazy old lady three doors down with too many cats, had heard the scream and called the cops. The police came to the complex a lot due to her constant noise complaints, but it seemed this time they had a legitimate reason to check out her statement. It was because of this that they were knocking on Terra's door.

 ** _Tara's_** _door_ , she reminded herself, _Terra's dead_.

She opened the door to see two young men in black and white patrol uniforms, the red eyes of their helmets seeming to bore into her soul.

"Ma'am, we were called about a domestic disturbance for this apartment. Is everything all right?"

"Everything's fine, officer," she said drowsily, "I just had a nightmare."

"Must have been some nightmare. We got three phone calls from this complex reporting that they heard a terrified scream."

 _You have no idea_.

"It was pretty scary," she said, "But it was just a dream."

 _I killed him._

 _No._ Terra _killed him. You were never even there._

"Well, be that as it may, we'd like to take a look around. We've been hearing reports of a prowler around here and we just want to make sure everything's okay."

 _Get a warrant._

"Sure. Knock yourself out."

The officers stepped into the small, grungy apartment, looking around.

"Nice place you got here."

 _The roaches love it._

"You live here alone?"

"Yeah."

"Pretty young to be living alone. Do you-"

"I have my emancipation documents and my citizenship papers. You guys always ask every time Mrs. Jenkins calls," Tara grumbled, opening a drawer on the stand she had by the door and presenting the papers to him

Tara Markov was a Russian immigrant and legally emancipated. Terra was still technically a wanted criminal.

"Just making sure," he said, looking the papers up and down. After handing them back, he looked at his partner and they both shrugged.

"Well, it seems like nothing's out of the ordinary. Sorry for taking your time. We'll see ourselves out. Have a good night, ma'am."

"You, too. Thanks, officers."

She shut the door and locked it behind them. She leaned against it and slid down until she sat at its base. _I'm Tara. I'm Tara. That nightmare was meant for someone else. I never hurt my friends. I never killed anyone. I'm not a murderer._

She looked at her hands. They were pale and had red marks where her nails had dug into her palms. But they weren't stained with blood. She blinked.

 _"Things change, Beast Boy. The girl you want me to be is just a memory."_

Tara didn't know him from Adam. Terra...didn't know anything. She was dead. She stood up and slipped back into bed, staring at the ceiling, looking at where the paint had peeled from the wall in the corner. She sighed, vowing to wake up early tomorrow and fix the place up, knowing that by dawn she'd forget completely. She tossed and turned, not wanting to revisit her nightmare. It plagued her. The cold, dead face. The warm blood on her hands. It had seemed so real, right until the end.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand just as she was about to drift off. She grabbed it and looked at the caller I.D. She didn't recognize the number, so let it go to voicemail. Probably someone drunk-dialing their ex-girlfriend or boyfriend. Anytime she had a phone call at this time of night, it was invariably one of those. All the more reason to let the voicemail handle it. They'd hear the obligatory 'Hi, this is Tara, sorry I can't come to the phone right now, so leave a message after the beep,' and then they'd try to call the right number. One time, a guy actually left a message on her phone. It was to someone else named Tara. At first, she'd been terrified, until the guy said something about 'chocolate hair.' After her initial shock and subsequent relief, she found the message pretty funny. She had called him the following morning and informed the hungover voice on the other end that he'd called the wrong number. She had then-

Her phone buzzed again. She checked it. Same number as the first time tonight. No message from the first call, either. She shrugged and let it go to voicemail. She decided that she needed to-

The phone buzzed again. Same number. Obviously, whoever this drunk was didn't seem to be getting the message. She snatched up her phone.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Tara?" Doug's voice slurred on the other line, the dull thump of bass from the party's music coming through the line.

 _Great_. Her night-shift coworker was drunk again. Doug was a college student at Jump University, working at the same diner she did because his parents told him that they'd only finance his college education if he kept a steady job. So he'd spend most of his time at school and then his job, but after that he'd go out to house parties all night. Despite his habits, he was always friendly toward her and had a perpetually calm, sheepish demeanor that was only inhibited when he was drunk.

"Tara? You there?"

She looked at the clock. 1:28 a.m.

"You're drunk."

"I was thinkin,'" he slurred into the phone, "We've been buddies for a while, right?"

"Doug, why are you calling me? It's almost 1:30 in the morning."

"I know, buts hear me out. I've got...I've got the...heeeey, buddy!" he giggled on the other end.

"What, Doug?"

"I don't wanna...don't wanna ruin...our friendship but I wanna take you out sometime."

And there it was. Tara'd been waiting for weeks. But not like this. Not at 1:30 in the morning, slurring his words as he tried to keep from peeing all over himself.

"Tara?"

"I'm here."

"So whaddaya think?"

"I think you should probably go home, take a nap, then call me when you're sober."

"Oh. Okay," Doug said, his voice sounding disappointed. Heartbroken.

"I'm not saying no. I'm saying call me when you sober up tomorrow. Okay?"

"Okay," he sounded a little happier. Hopeful.

"Now can you hand the phone back to whoever you borrowed it from? Good night."

"Okay. Good night, Tara."

The line hung up. She set her phone back on the nightstand and curled up under the covers. Then, her phone buzzed again, just as she was about to fall asleep. She looked at the clock. 2:03. She put her phone to her ear, not bothering to check caller I.D. She knew exactly who it was.

"Doug, what happened?"

"I got kicked out of a nightclub for being drunk."

"Are you on a payphone?"

"Yeah. Are you gonna go on a date with me?"

Tara pointedly ignored the question. Terra found it completely inappropriate, "Where are you?"

"I'm downtown."

"Where, specifically."

"I dunno," he giggled like a kid wanting to play a game.

"Doug, where are you? What's the biggest thing you can see?"

He giggled again, not answering.

"Doug, this is serious. I'm gonna take you home, so I need to know where you are."

"I'm outside Boothe Memorial Theatre. Why are the r and e backwards?"

"I don't know. Can you just hang tight outside there? Okay? Please?"

"You're gonna take me home?" he giggled again. Tara rolled her eyes. _Of course he'd think it's inappropriate. He's drunk._

"Yeah."

"Okay."

"Just sit tight."

She got out of bed and went to go change. Tara would generally dress to impress, or at the very least keep up appearances. Terra preferred t-shirts, shorts and thick, heavy leather gloves with goggles. Boots, too. Hiking boots with thick soles, with tough leather snakes couldn't bite through. But she wasn't Terra. Terra was dead. Tara had just woken up and needed to pick up her friend.

Skinny jeans, sneakers, and a bright t-shirt. That's what Tara would wear at 2:00 in the morning. Makeup? No. Terra never had it, found it pointless to pay ten dollars for a tube of foundation when that same ten dollars could pay for a week's worth of food. Tara felt the same way, but because it was cruel to animals or something. _Old habits die hard, I guess,_ she thought as she tied her shoes, picked up her biking helmet, and grabbed her apartment key from off its hook. She shut her door and locked it tightly. She tiptoed downstairs, sliding out the front door of the complex silently, hoping not to awaken Mrs. Jenkins and have to speak to the police yet again. Tara couldn't stand the perpetual odor of cat pee that seemed to permeate throughout the complex thanks to the old widow's numerous furry companions. Terra had slept in places where drunks had made their own personal lavatories two feet away from her sleeping face.

After she left the building, Tara unchained her bicycle from the stoop railing. As she strapped on her helmet, she slipped the lock and chain into a little saddlebag that hung from the back of the seat. The bicycle was red. Her favorite color. She biked down the street, headed for the Boothe Memorial Theatre to pick up her friend.

 _"You were the best friend I ever had."_

 _Terra said that to Beast Boy. Not me! Not Tara!_

Within minutes she was downtown, in front of the Boothe Memorial, but Doug was nowhere in sight.

"You've got to be kidding me," she growled as she looked around. Shadows danced in every building inset, and neon lights cast an eerie red glow over the street, like a thousand red eyes watching her.

 _"I trusted you! We trusted you!"_

Tara blinked. _That was Terra,_ she thought _, not me. I don't even know Raven._ She chained her bike to a bike rack and looked around. The street was entirely deserted.

Weird, she thought, reaching into her pocket to get out her phone. She flipped through her recent calls and dialed the payphone. She heard it ringing about a block away. She followed the noise. As she approached, she couldn't shake that something was off. She approached the phone. Someone was sitting slumped against its back, reeking of alcohol.

"Doug?"

The figure didn't move. She bent down to take a closer look. The figure craned its neck. It was Doug, and he was a bit worse for wear. His hair was plastered to his forehead, and his stubble was dotted with specs of vomit. The right side of his head was bleeding from a small cut. He smiled toothily, his brown eyes softening when they recognized her.

"Heeey!" he slurred.

"Come on," she said as she bent down to pull him to his feet, "Let's get you home."

"But I thought we were going on a date," he said sadly as he staggered to his feet, swaying.

 _Jesus, now?_

"Doug, it's nearly three in the morning. All the fun places are closed and I've got to get up at six for school. Remember? Besides, it won't be a fun date if you have to go to the bathroom every five minutes to-"

She didn't finish the sentence because he suddenly lurched forward, stumbled to the nearby landscaping, and threw up. She hoisted him back up after he finished puking. He looked at her with a sorrowful expression, "Sorry I ruined our date."

Tara laughed, despite herself. Even had they actually been on a date, throwing up once wouldn't count as ruining it. Not by a long shot.

 _A broken ferris wheel, a house of mirrors, a pounding heart, feet running and running and running. Blind panic. Terra finds herself surrounded by her own, horrified face, blue eyes staring at her with horror. She stares at her hands, hands that held someone else's so gently. What had she done?_

"Come on, Doug, I'll take you home."

"Wanna come in for coffee?" he slurred with an uncharacteristically lecherous grin.

Tara slapped his shoulder angrily, "Knock it off."

He looked down at his feet, "Sorry. Won't do it again."

As Tara half-walked, half-carried him down the road, she realized she had left her bike behind. Friends matter first, she thought.

 _"Slade was right. You don't have any friends."_

Tara had friends. Three high-school girls and a college boy with a drinking problem, but they were her friends. Doug shuffled along beside her, stopping every few minutes or so to throw up. She slowly began to reconsider the stance that his puking wouldn't have ruined a date. Tara's crush on him was momentarily forgotten when he belched a geyser of vomit that splashed on her arm and her shoes. He drunkenly begged for forgiveness. She used his jacket to wipe it off. Finally, she dumped him off at the front stoop of his home, telling him to get inside while he was still conscious.

"But...Mom'll know I've been drinking."

 _Your mother's a saint, Doug, for putting up with this crap night after night._

"She already knows, Doug. I called her on the way to finding you," she lied sweetly, smiling, "I'll call you tomorrow after I get home from school, see how you're doing."

"Okay."

She left him there and made her way back toward the theater, hoping against hope to find an open store that would let her use their bathroom to clean up more thoroughly. The stench made her nauseous. As expected, however, every storefront was closed and presumably locked. She'd have to clean up at her apartment. Tara called it home, but Terra couldn't bring herself to. Terra never had a home for long.

 _"She needs more than a place to crash."_

 _"She needs a home."_

 _"Why not our home?"_

Tara shivered as she relived a familiar stranger's memories. She stood up a little taller, her walk becoming more brisk. She checked the time. 2:37. She couldn't remember the last time she was up so late.

 _"Hope you weren't expecting a goodbye kiss."_

 _That was cruel_ , she thought before she could stop herself, _needlessly cruel. I'd hurt him enough and he always stood up for me_. Tara shook her head. The memories got worse when she was alone. When she was tired. When she was awake when she should be asleep. Her friends distracted her, but only to a point. As she approached the theater, she saw the bike rack where she had chained up her bike. It was empty, the broken chain hanging off the rack.

The earth quivered, not even enough to merit most people looking up. It felt like little more than a vibration, a buzzing against the feet. Minor earthquakes were more than common on the West Coast, being so close to a major fault line. A Midwestern farmer might panic at the slightest tremor, but residents of the West Coast wouldn't even bat an eye. They happened all the time around here. But Terra knew better. She spun, looking at the closest window. In her reflection, she saw the residual golden glow fading from a pair of bright, terrified blue eyes.

"You have control," she whispered to herself, "Slade taught you. You learned control from him."

 _You killed him with your bare hands, Terra._

"Terra?"

She spun in a panic, the voice familiar, a cracking, high-pitched male's. Beast Boy stood there, perplexed, concerned.

"Are you okay?"

 _No, no, no, no, no!_

"Why are you following me?" she snapped, backing away, hands before her defensively.

"I'm on the job, looking for a criminal," Beast Boy said, concern radiating from his eyes, "I didn't know you would be here. I didn't even know you'd be awake. It's really late out...are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she lied, her voice shaking with fear. _I'm not Terra, I'm not Terra, I'm not Terra._

"It's not safe out here, tonight. Do you want me to walk you home?" He took a step toward her.

"No!" she almost shouted.

He backed off, hands raised in a calming gesture, "It's okay, Terra. I just want to help."

"Stop calling me that!"

 _I'm Tara, not Terra. Terra was some poor, stupid girl who lost everything because she trusted the wrong person._

"Just...please leave, please go," she whispered, holding her arms.

"Why are you out here?" His voice wasn't demanding, interrogating. Just...concerned. A voice a friend would have when thinking about a friend's safety.

"A friend of mine got drunk at a party," she explained, "He called me and I took him home. Then I lost my bike. It doesn't matter. Please," she whispered, wrapping her arms around herself and turning away, "I just want to be left alone."

"I'm going now, okay? I'm sorry I bumped into you."

It wasn't an insult, or a barb meant to get her to react. It was genuine remorse. She could tell he felt that he was at fault for her state of mind. It only made her feel worse. All he did was check up on her.

"See you around," he said quietly. He morphed and with a flap of owl's wings, he disappeared into the dark night.

"See you," she said to herself, more out of habit than anything. She stared at her reflection. Tara's reflection. Terra's reflection. Then she did what she always did when the going got tough. What she always did when there was an avenue of escape.

Terra ran.


	2. Chapter 2

**Hey, robertskycard here!**

 **Remember when I said that the last chapter was part of a larger fic? Well, I actually have a second scene I wrote around the time of the first. It's more angst and pain, but it kinda has a happy...ish ending. The larger fic in general was all about superhero identities and how that could seriously mess someone up, with the stresses of crime fighting devolving an OC hero into full-blown split personalities. I don't feel comfortable subjecting people to a horrendously inaccurate portrayal of Dissociative Identity Disorder.**

 **With that said, here's little disclaimer before I proceed. Terra does NOT have multiple personalities. I admit, the way I wrote it tends to lend itsefl toward that hypothesis, but it's not the reality of the situation. Terra is doing what Terra does best. She's running from her problems. As much as I love her character, she does have a habit of refusing to face the reality of her situation, blowing things out of proportion, and reacting poorly when confronted. Because of this, I believe that when she was given the chance to start over, she took it. "Tara" is, for the purposes of this fic, a classic secret identity with a painful twist, a mask she uses when interacting with the regular, civilian world. In essence, she's put herself in a home-brewed version of the witness protection program using the identity she was born with, and the conflict between Terra and Tara is the reality of her superhero identity catching up to her civilian one.**

 **These two chapters, as well as the OC-centric fic, was an attempt at exploring the darker side of superheros and their secret identities overall. In the full blown version of the fic, Terra would have to eventually decide if she wanted to be Terra, the hero, or Tara, the average girl, and it would deal with the fallout of her decision. As the Teen Titans (in the show proper) pretty much live as their superhero identities, the possibility of permanently deciding to be one of the two was entirely possible.**

 **Finally, I want to profusely thank all of the people who viewed, reviewed, followed, and faved this fic. You guys are heroes in your own right.**

* * *

Terra hadn't gone to school for two days after taking Doug home that night. She gave the school a courtesy and called each morning, a raspy voice telling the officials that she would be unable to attend classes on account of contracting the flu. The receptionist offered her sympathy and hoped she would come back soon. She had a few free sick days from her job, so she just cashed them in. They knew that Tara would be back. Eventually.

Terra stared at her hands. Her blood-stained hands. Slade wasn't the first. He probably wouldn't be the last. The first had been the victim of a mudslide in the Ukraine. He had been a little boy, only a few years younger than Terra had been. Terra had lost control of her power and the nearby mountain had crushed the boy's home. She had seen him, cold and pale, cradled in his weeping mother's arms, tears streaming down his father's face as he knelt beside his child.

The next had been an old shepherd in Switzerland. She had been helping him with his sheep in exchange for a place to stay and food to eat. He had been standing out at the edge of a rocky outcropping when her powers lashed out. The rock he stood upon suddenly gave way and he fell a hundred feet to his death. She made the mistake of looking over the edge and saw him, limbs twisted at odd angles, blood pooling beneath his greying hair and his broken, kind face. She would remember it till the day she died.

Then there was the earthquake that devastated a city. The casualties numbered in the hundreds, with forty-seven dead and a hundred and eighty five injured. The final body count was not established for two weeks, as the last death was someone who had been trapped under rubble and had suffocated. Terra had walked amongst the carnage, looking at the twisted wrecks that had once been homes and offices. She had looked upon the hundreds of people screaming and crying out for their loved ones.

And that was just Europe.

She'd made her way to America on a boat, hoping against hope her powers wouldn't break the ocean floor and swamp the boat in a tsunami. The ship made it safely to American shores, but Terra was foolish to think that she was safe, that everyone around her was safe. She tried to use her powers to help people, but when they lashed out, they hurt people. Killed them. And the others who witnessed it drove her away in fear and grief. She had eventually come to Jump City, where she met the Titans. And Slade.

Yet out of all the people she killed, Slade was the one who haunted her dreams the most. Unlike the others, his death wasn't an accident. She had killed him in anger, for coercing her to betray the only friends she'd ever had, for turning against her in her hour of need, for turning her into a puppet and an extension of his will. She killed him because she was sick of fighting, sick of hurting good people, sick of running. Every night spent sleeping in alleys, every night eating moldy food, every night spent running from families of people she'd hurt, it all came piling up, all came crashing down, and Terra unleashed all that pain, all that anger, all that fear, and all that hopelessness on Slade.

And it killed him.

 _He was evil_ , she kept telling herself, _he never cared about you. You were just a means to an end to him._ But when she looked at her hands, they looked stained with blood and they wouldn't stop shaking.

She looked up from her position on her bathroom floor, staring at the mirror on the back of the door. She saw a little girl, naked and alone, curled up in a ball, shivering, dripping water from a shower all over the tile floor. She didn't want to stand, didn't want to look at her own body, didn't want to see the scars over her chest where Slade's neural interface was surgically removed. She used to run her hands through her hair frequently, just to tuck it behind her ear. But now she couldn't, or else she'd feel the bumps where they'd sawed into her skull to remove the neural implants, the devices on her head that influenced her every thought, the devices that made her believe that the Titans wanted to kill her. _That was all a lie_ , she realized later. They would never have crossed that blood-red line.

 _Except for Raven, maybe_ , she thought. Somehow, that morbid thought comforted her.

A knock on the door made her freeze.

"Tara? It's Kelly."

Kelly. One of Tara's friends, the blonde haired cheer captain and another one of Tara's coworkers. Why she had elected to be Tara's friend, Tara didn't know. Tara was average. No after-school activities, no especially high grades. Tara was just a face in the crowd. Maybe it was because Tara was the most responsible person in the diner. Or maybe it was because Kelly broke the stereotypical mold of an uppercrust rich girl and was kind to everyone she came across.

Tara found it in herself to stand up, keeping her eyes away from the mirror as she picked a bathrobe off its hook and wrapped it around herself. Keeping her eyes on her feet, she carefully stepped out of the bathroom, almost slipping on the water that had dripped onto the floor. She slid her feet into a pair of slippers and made her way to the door, coughing as she did so. She slid open the chain lock and then opened the door, not even looking up as she gestured for her friend to come in.

Kelly looked around and Tara could feel the pity begin to radiate off her as she got a better glimpse into Tara's domestic life, not the schoolgirl facade she put up during class. Kelly cast her a sympathetic glance.

"Are you okay, Tara?"

"I've got the flu," Tara said with a groan as she shuffled over to her bed, sitting down with a grunt. Kelly took another look around the apartment, like an appraiser looking at a house on the market.

"It can't be good for you to be cooped up in here all day," Kelly said, sitting down beside Tara gingerly. She reached over and tucked a loose strand of blonde behind Tara's ear. She was always touchy-feely like that, and sometimes it sent the wrong message to people. Tara knew it was just friendly concern.

"You don't look good. Have you been keeping hydrated?"

Truth be told, Tara had almost been completely forgotten. Terra had been behind the wheel, and she didn't want to eat or drink, just wanted focus on how exhausted she was, how many people she'd hurt. Tara had just come back to the forefront and was still unsure what she'd been doing with her life for the past couple of days. With the dry, sticky feeling in her mouth, though, 'hydrating' hadn't been one of the priorities. She shook her head.

Kelly stood up and went to the fridge, looking inside. She frowned, apparently not liking what she found in there. Tara knew why. Her drink supply was mostly soda with some expired milk she hadn't thrown out yet, nothing someone as health conscious as Kelly would ever drink. Shutting the door and reaching up into the cabinets, Kelly pulled out a glass and filled it in the sink. She brought it to Tara.

"Here."

Tara gently took the glass from Kelly's hand and drank deeply as Kelly sat beside her, "Thanks."

"No problem."

They sat in silence for a moment as Tara nursed her glass. It suddenly came to mind that Kelly was normally at cheer practice around this time.

"Aren't you supposed to be at practice?"

"Coach cancelled practice today. Inclement weather."

Tara looked out her window and saw the water running down the glass in rivulets, heard it pattering on the roof. She hadn't even noticed it was raining, or that Kelly was wet.

"Oh," she said, draining her glass. She moved to stand up, but Kelly gently pulled the glass out of her hand.

"Let me get that."

Kelly refilled the glass and brought it back. Despite Kelly's warmth and kindness, she was awkward when she didn't know what was wrong or why. Needless to say, Tara had a lot of awkward conversations with Kelly. This turned out to be one of them.

"Doug told me you said you were gonna call him," Kelly said as she sat down, trying to break the ice.

"I know. I just didn't want to hear an earful from his parents."

"He's just worried, Tara. Amber and Dionne are, too. Look, you know that you can tell me anything, right?"

"Yeah," Tara sighed. Kelly was wrong. Some things were meant to be secrets, "Everything's fine. I've just been sick these past couple of days."

Kelly shifted nervously.

"What?"

"It's just..." Kelly began twiddling her thumbs, "Ever since that Beast Boy kid showed up and talked to you you've been...sort of...different."

"Different how?" Tara said with more bitterness than she'd intended.

"I mean you've just kinda...closed off."

 _Well that was one way to describe it_ , Tara thought, _a more accurate term would have been 'mental civil war.'_ She didn't say anything about that.

"I'm sorry, Kelly. It's just...awkward when some guy thinks you're somebody else."

The guilt of the lie nearly tore her heart out.

"He's not just 'some guy,'" Kelly admonished, "He's a Teen Titan."

"Exactly."

"Look," Kelly said, taking Tara by the shoulders, "I'm just trying to see if there was anything...untoward that went on."

"'Untoward?'"

"I mean...did he...did he try to...because you know how some celebrities get around girls. They just don't take 'no' for an answer."

Terra wanted to rip her in half for even the suggestion of it. Beast Boy was not like that. He was _never_ like that. He was awkward, sheepish. Kind.

Tara glared at her friend, "Nothing happened. He just tried to make me remember stuff that happened with some other girl. He's left me alone since."

"Oh. Well...good."

 _Good. Right._

"Did...anything else happen? Anything at all?" Kelly said gently.

Tara had enough. She didn't want to talk about this. She didn't want to tell her that Beast Boy's little visit had brought to mind all the terrible things she had done, "Why are you asking me this?"

"It's just that everything's been normal but you've been in kind of a funk. The only thing that really stood out to me was that thing that happened with Beast Boy, so I assumed-"

"It has nothing to do with that, so just leave it, okay?"

Kelly suddenly went on the offensive, "Okay, then what does it have to do with?"

"It's..."

 _I betrayed my friends. I killed someone. I pretend to one of my best friends that I don't even know him._

"It's personal."

Kelly gave her a look and Tara realized it was probably the wrong thing to say. But Terra could never be permitted to come free. Not after that night. Not after she nearly lost control again.

Kelly spoke, "You go to school, go to work, and go straight home, barely talking to any of us, never making any plans to hang out. We call you, it goes straight to voicemail. We text you, get nothing back. All I'm doing is trying to look out for you, so you can at least do me a courtesy and clue me in on what's going on. We're concerned about you. We're your friends. Please. Don't shut us out."

"I'm sorry," Tara said and then did what she always did. She invented a lie and broke her own heart, "Okay. You're right. It does have something to do with Beast Boy. It's just...that poor kid. I could just tell he really felt something for that Terra girl he kept mentioning. He wanted so badly for me to be her. She must have been someone real special to him. But she's gone, and I can't be that girl for him. I feel sorry for the poor guy. He was never anything but nice to me."

"And that's why you've been avoiding us?"

"I guess so. I don't know why, but I keep thinking about how badly his luck turned out."

Kelly gave her a skeptical look, but didn't question the veracity of her statement. She took Tara's hands in hers, "He's gonna be fine, Tara. One day, he's going to find someone else and he'll be happy. Sure, he's grieving now, but he'll eventually move on. And at least one of the lady Titans is still single, right?"

Tara nodded in agreement but the words cut through Terra like a knife. She knew him better. He didn't 'move on' when she was dead, how could he move on if she was alive? Her only choice had been to lie to him, to break his heart, to pretend she was someone else. _If you want to change your identity_ , she thought bitterly _, you become a liar_. Liar. Traitor. Murderer. All words to describe Beast Boy's perfect girl.

"Tara?"

"Yeah?"

"You kinda zoned out for a second."

Another memory wormed its way out.

 _"If you knew something bad about me, would you still be my friend?"_

Experience had taught her that the answer was complicated.

"Oh. Sorry," Tara stood up, shaking her head. It was time to get out of this apartment, get away from Terra for a while, "Thanks, Kelly. I feel a bit better, now. Can we go get something to eat? I'm starving."

Kelly smiled as she stood up beside her, "Great! Do you want me to invite Amber and Dionne?"

Tara smiled, "Sure."


End file.
